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Friday, September 30, 2011

Facebook is Deciding What We Should See

Genealogists actively use social media to communicate and share information. It seems that Facebook is now making it harder for us to do that. In the last week or so they have started making major changes. The problem is these changes are causing me to miss posts by people I want to hear from.

I discovered recently that we need to click the upper right hand corner of status updates to control our News Feeds. This is what you'll see:

Notice all the new settings, particularly - All updates, Most Updates and Only Important? Facebook is deciding for us what we shall see. I have been going in and changing the setting to All Updates for people I don't want to miss.

I did an experiment where I went to the wall of one of my Facebook friends. I noticed that she posted a link 30 minutes earlier. When I went to my News Feed her post was no where to be found. The problem is the option box that you see above is not available when viewing a post on someone's personal wall. It's only available from the News Feed. If I can't find her in the News Feeds then I can't change the setting to subscribe to All Updates.

I'm getting a bit frustrated with Facebook. I'm finding that I need to actively visit certain people's walls so that I don't miss their posts.

If anyone knows the way to fix this please let me know. I'd like to get my friends back!

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Update:

I've just discovered that you can get to the same options by clicking the subscribed button in the upper right hand corner of your screen (see below). This is visible from your friends' walls. I'm still not convinced this is going improve what I can see.

One way that I have found is to open a list say family. Then in the upper right corner there is a button, MANAGE LIST, this opens a drop down list where you can add people and also chose the update types,(this take two clicks). long and laborious but will allow you to see your friends and their posts.

Try moving to Google +!! This way you can add the genealogists to your circle and see their posts as they update. You can create a separate circle for family and friends. Facebook is trying so hard to compete with Google + and instead they're frustrating everyone and driving them away.

I'd like to know how they decide what's important. My mom called the other night asking what I did to my hair. Apparently, a post had showed up on her news feed in which I was complaining about my husband not noticing my hair was a different color. It took a few minutes for me to figure it out, but I finally remembered posting that over a year ago.

Really, they expect us to go through all this nonsense?? Really??? Not happening here, not right now, have to wonder if I will ever do all this silly stuff to use FB effectively again. FB, it just ain't looking good for you.